Investigating Footwearmerch.com: Legit Store or Shady Scam?

Footwearmerch.com is a fraudulent website that offers to purchase items at extremely low prices. This site may look like a discounter or a reseller of goods from stock liquidation, but it is actually just a ploy to make you think about this site as a legitimate one. After ordering goods from this site, you will most likely get nothing at all, or, at best, inferior or counterfeit items.

In this article, I will show the warning signs regarding the Footwearmerch.com store, the way this deception operates, and explain how to detect similar scams. This will help you to avoid similar shopping frauds in future.

Footwearmerch.com Site – Scam Overview

As I said, Footwearmerch.com may initially appear like a authentic discounter or the merchant of stock liquidation items. But a swift analysis shows a disturbing amount of red flags that say clearly about this site’s dishonesty. Unfair advertising methods, extremely low prices, absence of user support and customer testimonials – this site completes the scam bingo right away.

Footwearmerch.com Scam

By shopping on websites like Footwearmerch.com, it is unlikely that you will acquire the items you’ve ordered. More frequently, it results in one of 3 cases characteristic for scam sites.

Counterfeit goods. Not the worst option, as you get at least something. But as it usually happens to imitation items of popular brands, the attribute will be inferior, to say the least. Eventually, the site may notify about that somewhere deep in the item description or “about us” page, but users rarely check them thoroughly. This is a notably frequent case when ordering from pages that sell baubles, small electronics and stuff the like.

Wrong item. To make the transaction look legit, but spend even less money on the delivered item, rascals may send a incidental item they have instead of your order. An old t-shirt instead of a brand new one, a scratched aluminum platter instead of a set of dishes – scammers may turn quite inventive in that case.

Absolutely nothing. This is the most common outcome when ordering goods from sites like Footwearmerch.com. Frauds take your money, promise the delivery, and then merely disappear. As scam sites are not going to exist for a long time, fraudsters do not bother themselves with creating even a remote visibility of legitimacy.

Footwearmerch.com scam – How does it work?

As any fraud, Footwearmerch.com runs a simple and well-proven modus operandi. It commonly consists of 3 stages, with certain deviations from time to time.

Step 1 – Attract the Masses. Scammers post abundant amounts of marketing on social media, particularly preferring Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Paid ads say exactly the same things as their sites do: 90% discounts, free delivery around the world, hurry up to get the deal.

Ads of fraudulent shops posted on different platforms

As users deem ads on the mentioned platforms benevolent, they do not suspect anything at this point. Ads become particularly convincing during major events that boost people’s interest in shopping, like Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, etc. Sometimes, they mask themselves as resellers of the liquidated stock of bankrupt retail companies.

Step 2 – Take the Money. Once users are on the website, fraudsters do their best to make the users buy something. Impossibly good deals, additional discounts, free shipping, bright and blinking “Order Now” buttons that are just everywhere – they use every single method possible. And this works out – uninformed users stick to the offers and proceed to paying for the order.

Payments are done in a peculiar manner. Instead of more classic options for online shopping, like Visa/MasterCard payments or PayPal, scammers offer using direct bank transfers, Venmo or CashApp. Thing is, the latter do not provide any refunds, regardless of the circumstances. Even when you can prove that the transaction went to scammers, “no refunds” is a part of their policy which you agree on upon registration.

Step 3 – Vanish. Once crooks get enough money, or – what is more likely – there are enough complaints and user reports about the site being a scam, they simply disappear. Usually, this happens at around the 2nd or 3rd week of the site activity. Once enough people know about the dishonest activity, the profits will dry up, leaving fraudsters with no motivation to move on. Reporting the scam to the domain hosting helps take the domain down pretty quickly.

Why is Footwearmerch.com a Scam?

Well, we just talked about the way the scam site operates. Now, let’s see how to understand whether the site is untrustworthy without risking your money. Fortunately, scammers do not bother themselves with creating well-rounded disguises, so the same red flags repeat from one site to another.

1. Fake or absent reviews

Scam sites aim to exist for 1-2 weeks, so there’s no purpose (and way) to make any online reputation with user reviews. Obviously, even benign online shopping sites will lack client testimonials when they have just started, as there were only a few consumers yet. For that reason, this sign is not stand-alone and requires confirmation by other signs or indicators.

Definitely not generic comments generated by AI

However, once you face unrealistic reviews that have no relation to what the site markets, that’s definitely not a good sign. Any indistinct or drivel reviews that may describe any item sold on the site should be taken with a grain of salt. And well, on dishonest websites you will get an entire saltcellar. Do not hesitate searching for reviews on Google – this may save your money.

2. Unbelievably high discounts/low prices

No merchants will sell goods at loss for themselves. 70%, 80%, 90% reductions are not viable even during sales events such as the aforementioned Christmas. In some cases, fraudulent websites have the initial price low without saying anything about discounts, but they will most likely be ludicrous, like $30 for a bed or $10 for a branded leather bag. Goods may be sold for cheap, but every discount has its rational limits.

3. No customer support.

This is what distinguishes deceptive websites from the benign ones, even newly established. When a site is about to defraud the clients, there’s no need to bother about answering their questions. Check out the “About us” or “Info” page – the page will have no support contacts whatsoever.

Typically for fraudulent websites, the “About us” column is completely empty

When they offer a contact email, or even a phone number to reach them out, there is a huge chance that these numbers and emails will be dead silent to your request. This, or they will answer you with generic text regardless of your inquiry.

As scammers tend to reuse numbers and emails as “support” contacts, you can search them on Google. When they appear on a completely different website, be sure you are facing a blatant scam.

A chain of scam sites that use the same “support email”

4. Payments via payment systems that does not support refunds

This scam indicator is not a guarantee, as there are plenty of benign shops using direct bank transfers, CashApp, Venmo or similar payment systems. Each of the latter has the same feature I’ve already mentioned above: they do not suppose any refunds. And this is what makes it so attractive to scammers – once you paid for the order, nothing will help you to get the money back.

Some websites may also ask for payments in crypto, which is even less controllable than aforementioned payment methods. While cryptocurrency payments expand their presence slowly, they still remain a beloved bay for different rascals.

5. Items’ images are sourced from another page

As scams most likely don’t have any items on hand, they are not able to shoot unique pics. Thus their only option is to steal these images elsewhere. When frauds sell identical items on different pages, you can find same images on similarly-looking scam sites. By searching for the image on Google, you can prove whether the image is unique or not.

Image duplicates on another scam site, as well as on Amazon and Walmart sites

6. Design repeats the one of a different page

Rascals do not stop on stealing photos. As scammers may parasite on the same topic repeatedly, they reuse the same web design under the new URL, and voila – a new scam is ready to rock-n-roll! In some cases, reverse image search advice from the previous paragraph may lead you to the copy of the page you’ve started on. It allows you to unveil such frauds pretty easy, but scoundrels who stand behind them never aim at cautious users.

Example of scam sites that duplicate each others’ design

Frequently Asked Questions about the Footwearmerch.com Scam